The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

to do the trick. They were delivered on the post-office blanks with the glue-mounted paper ribbons from a telegraph machine which had printed the words, "come Friday ten Moscow-Kiev car seven".

The telegram messages conveyed the raw core of information because you had to pay for each word in it and for each punctuation mark, including the address of the person to whom it was sent… Alms are the insurmountable coach at the laconic style.

But if you had money to burn then, of course, you could write in full – "I AM ARRIVING ON FRIDAY BY THE TRAIN MOSCOW-KIEV AT 10 AM IN THE CAR NUMBER SEVEN PERIOD", and then even add in the end – "I LOVE YOU FOREVER COMMA MY DEAR PERIOD"

And the workers from the Main Post-Office would bring the telegram in their tiny black on-duty handbag, "Sign here on the receipt, please."…)

She ended her work at five, and we met by the five-story hotel "The Seagull" paneled with yellowish stone tiles. On the wide porch beside the entrance to the hotel, there were two more glass doors: The Inter-City Telephone Communication Station, and The Main Post-Office.

We left the porch and Olga led me to the The Main Post's service entrance on the back of the building. She entered first and went ahead alone to the far end in the long corridor, where she turned around and beaconed me. Some doors stood open and there were women sitting with their backs to me, in front of their windows in the glass partitions that separated them from the lined customers.

We descended into a wide basement hall with long low windows overhead and beneath them a row of shower stalls alongside the wall. Entering one of the stalls, we undressed and Olga turned the hot water on.

(…in the mid-90's the scene in the shower, starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in some action movie, was declared the hottest Hollywood erotic of the year.

But they plagiarized it from our visit to the Main Post-Office! Twenty years later.

And now they tell me there was no sex in the USSR. Yes, there was!

Only the term for it sounded differently…)

At the end of our hot f-f…er…well, I mean… scene… there was a certain moment that Hollywood never dare to shoot. That is when along Olga's white taut thigh, in between droplets and paths of the running hot water, there crept two-three whitish-roiled spits… I had certainly seen that frame before but could not put my finger on where exactly… Yes, I became "protective careful" already.

(…a superficial pulp-fiction-founded self-education may often give rise to grave misconceptions.

For a long time, I entertained an erroneous opinion that 'masturbation' stood exclusively for sedulous handwork—chafing your cock until you cum. But, no!. As it turned out, even in the Old Testament there was a geezer named Onan, who regularly watered the earth floor in his tent with his seed at the concluding stage of, otherwise normal, sexual intercourse. The final chord, so to speak.

That chord was (using the term by lahboohs, aka musicians) just "a stinky clam", absolutely out of tune, yet served a means of protective care to prevent unwanted conception…)

And, secondly, I was freaked out by Olga's first pregnancy and feared a repetition – who would care? I did not want to get tied up in wedlock, and one dark night on the porch of Sveta's khutta, I even gave it a try at ridding of the delightful cause of the unwanted effect.

I told her that it was time for us to part. She started crying, "Why?."

I lit a cigarette, "We must do it. I have met another."

"Who?! Tell me her name!"

"You wouldn’t know her."

"But tell me!"

"Well…in short…some…well…Sveta."

"Where does she live?"

"Nigh the gypsies' block."

"You lie!"

"No, I don't."

And I lit the second cigarette from the stub of the first, as in Italian black-and-white movies, though I did not want to smoke at all, the second one tasted too bitter and even disgusting. I smoked half of it, felt nauseated and gave up. It was the surrender to both of them: I could not finish off the cigarette, neither could I manage to break up with Olga. The following week, she announced that she was pregnant again and no longer had the pill…

I called my parents to come to the lean-to because we had to talk. They came in, wary and silent, unaccustomed to such invitations.

I sat on the chair under the glassed frame by the head of the bed. Mother remained standing at the opposite siderails of the empty bed, only leaned against them. Father stood next to her with his hand resting on the long box-workbench alongside the blind wall. Then and there, I announced that I had to marry Olga.

"How that to marry?" asked Mother.

"As a noble man of quality, I am obliged to marry her," clarified I, uneasy that the delicate bare-bone “have to” proved not as graspable as expected.

My parents exchanged wordless glances, Father shook his head, Mother responded his clue with a silent sigh. Then they sat down on the bed, side by side, and started a detailed discussion on how we were going to organize the noble man’s wedding…

~ ~ ~

When I and Olga submitted to the city ZAGS the application stating our wish to get married, they gave us the paper for Bridal Salons so that we could buy nuptial tackle at a discount. In Konotop, there was such a salon behind the Central Park of Recreation, however, all they had there was nothing but two dust-coated mannequins of bride and groom with separate blank gazes from out their narrow cage of a shop window. We had to go to Kiev… Lekha Kuzko went with us as an expert, because he had already gone thru all of that when marrying Tatyana, and learned places. In Kiev, we bought rings, the one for Olga was a little yellower, but that of mine – wider. We also bought new shoes for me, and a white silk mini dress for Olga, as well as